The anemic yellow/green foliage gave way to a light brown and then to a totally barren landscape.
“Why hasn’t the vegetation recovered here?”
Bill looked at Martin for a moment. “It’s the mystery again. Even the animals and birds have an emotional dislike for the area. They haven’t detected any particular danger, but the fact is that they still don’t know. Relax; we’ll do fine.”
“It’s not the dying; I’d just like to pick my poison.”
“That’s different. Most people hope that they will be gone in a flash; before they know it.”
“Is that dark area where the pit is?” Martin squinted past the sun, reflecting off some wing features.
“Yes. The mound area on the right is the excavation where they entered the tunnel. You can’t see the pit yet, because the black walls blend into the blackened surface rock.”
“Is the black from the fire? I would have guessed that it would be washed away by now.”
“You’re right about that. The black that you see now is mainly metal oxide and an obsidian crust. You may see some reflections off the interior wall of the pit. Obsidian glass lines the pit all the way down. The pit walls are quite irregular for the top hundred feet or so, but down where the mass began its descent, the walls are almost perfectly smooth. Who would have thought that merely displacing the bedrock could generate so much heat?”
“How big is the mass?”
“It’s under a hundred feet in diameter but it has a specific gravity of about three hundred. That’s one heavy marble; just under a billion tons. That is beyond the capacity of the bedrock to support it. Once the bedrock heats up it loses its compressive strength and starts to flow around the sphere; it rebounds so that the shaft diameter is less then the sphere diameter.”
“How far has it gone?”
“It’s about a mile down. It is still moving about three or four inches a day.”
“How did you calculate the weight?”
“That’s not too difficult; gravitional variations, the effects on the bedrock. They have a few more tricks as well.”
“Is there any chance that it could do something violent.?”
“The answer is that they aren’t sure what it is capable of. There are stars with lower densities. It isn’t heating very rapidly but who knows what will happen and at what temperature?. Oh, get ready with the helmet. Don’t put it on yet. I want you to get a good look. I’ll let you know if there is any cause for alarm.”
They approached the pit from the North. The pilot had slowed to a crawl, wings up, engines revving, they dangled precariously in the air. Seated slightly behind the wing, Martin could nearly see straight down. The plane lurched as it entered the thermal over the pit. Then as the pilot banked into a shallow turn and approached the center of the shaft. Martin stared intently. Straight below in the center of a lightless background, a pinpoint of light, a shimmering red glow, reflected off the walls in concentric arcs of light from thousands of feet below; a glimpse into hell.
“If this isn’t cause for alarm, I don’t know what is.”
“You want to make another pass?”
“No, that won’t be necessary. I’m convinced.”
“The large cavity at the top of the shaft is the area where the seven hundred foot section of accelerator vanished. It caved in a little later. Tunnel access is sealed off several hundreds yards back from the pit. They send people in periodically for a first-hand look but most of the monitoring is done remotely.”
“What exactly happened; what did they learn from this.”
“This is where is gets religious, because, frankly, I think they are short of scientific white wash.”
“I’m okay with that. Keep going.”
“Okay. It’s like this. The experiment they were in the process of performing should have identified a quasi- particle called a plasmon. Its existence had been theorized long ago. From start to finish the active part of the experiment takes a billionth of a second or so. There isn’t much to hear and other then data gathering, not much to see. The video links didn’t show anything out of the ordinary. There were only a couple technicians at the experiment site, the rest of us were in Lab Seven, about a half a mile away. The experiment was initiated, a short wait for energy loading and then the lights flickered, which was expected, some alarm signals sounded and about two seconds later, just about the time people were starting to suspect a problem, a sharp clap of thunder hit the building and we could hear windows shattering in the outer offices. There was a pause while everyone looked at each other hoping for an easy explanation. Then as if on queue, the place erupted into a keystone cops routine. Everyone was going every which way just as if they knew what came next; which no one did. Phones began to ring and above the din I heard someone holler that there had been an explosion somewhere between station 135 and 227, just short of but including the target impact station.
The first alarms from the site didn’t make any sense. The control panels lit up like the Las Vegas Strip. The site data stream vanished as well as the audio and video links; nothing, just static. The remote sensors registered a few degrees temperature rise but radiation detectors that were still working didn’t show anything to get excited about. A power spike caused by the disruption, tripped breakers and within moments everything went black. The silence was deafening. The only thing fracturing the silence was voices in adjacent offices. A second or two after that the emergency lights came on, fire alarms trip and people started looking for a leader. The only thing left to do was to get the hell out of there.
The first responders to the tunnel were met with blocked accesses. Cave-ins had closed off all shafts and access corridors to station 221 where WENDY is or was. The people that approached from station 101 accesses were met with a totally obscuring dust cloud in the tunnel. Fortunately for them the air cleared enough that when they reached station 135 they saw the light, sunlight to be exact. The trench that replaced the tunnel extended 250 feet up to daylight. There was a 75-foot drop-off at the end of the catwalk. To add to their astonishment, very little damage occurred in the part of the tunnel in which they stood.
A Steven Hawking quote came to mind; something about holding an “End of the Earth Party” the night before the facility start-up. There were a number of scientists who were concerned that not enough was known about particle properties to proceed on the present course. They were concerned that a black hole might result.
Red faces were the least of it. Several technicians were vaporized. Who knows maybe they’re on the moon.
There were a few scientists who actually believed that God himself thwarted attempts to proceed in unlocking the secrets of sub-atomic particles; milestone setbacks were eerily regular.
Later, when they analyzed that data, it became clear that something far greater, than first thought, had happened. For, if the amount of mass in the trench had simply disappeared, it would have resulted in an explosion that would have involved most of the planet. We wouldn’t be here if it had vaporized in a nuclear event. Basically, it boils down to E=MC2, which essentially means that the sum total of mass and energy in the universe is constant. To convert that much mass into energy would likely be a nuclear event. It should have been an event several hundred thousand times bigger than it was. They measured the physical size of the mass and compared it with numbers coming from some satellites and found that nothing had happened. The mass was still there, somewhere. They took a closer look at the site. Thermal imaging from space verified only that something had happened and was in fact, still happening. There were all kinds of radiation readings but no visible light. Infra red cameras were flown over the sight and for the first time they got an image that showed the spherical mass. Again they jumped to some obvious conclusions, and decided that the sphere was the displaced mass from the cavity. In fact that wasn’t the case. The spectral analyze helped determine that the composition of the sphere couldn?
??t be reconciled with what was initially there. Even if it is the same mass, how did it increase in density by a factor of three hundred? It’s heating up. Who knows what that means? Chances are we won’t fill in all the blanks on this event any time soon. There are proposals to collapse the shaft in on itself but that is problematic. There is also some talk about using the shaft for other purposes; whatever that means. Personally, I think it’s a volcano looking for a place to happen. Some just call it the ‘bottomless Pit’; a reference to the Biblical one, I think.”
“What does the Choke-Point Project have to do with this?”
“You’re in luck with the timing of that question. Your security clearance came through my office this morning. You’ll be briefed on your clearance later but I guess I can give you some details. Just don’t turn me in.”
“It’s a deal. I assume you won’t have to shoot me when we’re finished.”
“Not this time.
About two years after the event, a scientist in NorAm came up with the notion that their final conclusion was correct; the mass doesn’t belong here. It came from somewhere else. It’s the next thing to a black hole. His theory was that the original experiment resulted in an answer that couldn’t be contained in the equipment available; at least not this answer. The quantum energy packet that we were looking for is real. The particle, as it turns out, isn’t a particle at all. The first guess was that it must be associated with the speed of light; which didn’t set well with Mister Science. He finally settled on the theory that it is related to the time element, not distance or velocity. Time has always been a point of almost eccentric curiosity for scientific minds. It is not well understood; it’s mainly been a philosophical discussion. It is one of those things we just couldn’t seem to screw up, at least until now that is. Mister Science came up with the notion that it was the key or a key to an ultimate understanding of “time”. It was present in matter, to keep everything from happening at once. That’s not a joke, it’s truer than you think. He surmised that if you could fiddle with it a little that you could get its associated matter to disappear and reappear in a different time. He concluded, that in order for the conservation of matter to work, that the matter it displaced would just have to trade places with something else. And so it does. It took a while for a colleague to realized that if density has something to do with it, that we could have had a rude surprise. To suddenly replace that pit with the equivalent mass from the vacuum of outer space would undoubtedly produce a thunderclap that would still be ringing in our ears. That almost happened with the sphere. Its size being smaller than the mass that was here created a void that needed to be filled. That was the explosion or, more correctly, implosion that occurred. By changing the time in which that chunk of matter existed, it also changed its locations. It came from some place but we don’t have a clue where. Can you imagine the surprise on other end when they received seven hundred feet of useless tunnel?
If I could crank back your mass clock, so to speak, you would merely exist in another time as well as another place. Unfortunately, the mass that you consist of today isn’t the same mass you were made up of ten years ago. Therefore you wouldn’t exist in a coherent form; some of you would but not in a viable form. The only thing that might be the same, would be things like tooth fillings, some parts of your brain tissues, and miscellaneous cells here and there. Those would all be part of the living body that is you today but in the strictest sense, it would be someone else, if it was anyone at all. All that would have happened would be that the entire earth would have realigned to accommodate the old order of things. The rearranging of the elements here might result in the global heat rise of a billionth of a degree or so. The conservation of energy would survive. Mister Science figured that with the state of computer technology it would be possible to totally map the whole body. It is possible to not only reorder mass to a different time but to translate it intact. We’ve got some pretty big computers but mapping every atom in your body for the trip, now that would be some serious computer power. At this point someone asked the question “How did we survive the first translation?” The chances of that happening by luck were astronomically out of the question. No amount of calculation seemed to justify the chance happening. The final conclusion to the question of “Who saved our bacon?” had only one answer; the Boss. God, in his great mercy, plugged the gap in man’s innocence. For some, God’s mercy in the matter only served as a license to continue in the research.
Further research showed that one of the things that must be true is that the focus particle was not matter, energy, or light. It is therefore a new level of existence. This heralded the discovery of a new realm. Time has always been a part of such considerations but now there was a need to compartmentalize it in a different fashion.
About that time a group made up of philosophers, scientists, theologians, and some other free thinkers got together to deal with this and other related topics. With the world in the state that it was, it didn’t take long for the theologians to make their point. Their point was that if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and, well, speaking of ducks, shouldn’t we get ours in a row? There was some resistance to the bias, but it was finally agreed that at least they would include a God filter in future considerations. It was eloquently put by one of the pastors when he said “God is a God of order, and that gentlemen, is the reason that neither science nor any other discipline has found an ultimate contradiction. There is no contradiction; just misinterpretation, closed minds, egos, and competing agendas. Ladies and gentlemen,” he said “humanity is being mugged by a devil wielding an unloaded gun. His only real tool, and he uses it well, is to divide and conquer. He gets us to compromise ourselves into ignorance of the truth.” A few struggled with it, but it was time to accept victory in the face of eminent defeat, such as it was. It was conceded, that we existed this day because God chose to halt the extinction due us in the midst of our arrogance. God must be with us, and not against us; we are the benefactors of his choosing. God is due our acknowledgement and gratitude. God desires our participation in the process of creation. The human race still has far to go and much to learn.
* * * * *
Chapter 18 – The Image of God
A good test of preeminence importance is to see which consideration can survive the loss of the contrary.
Anonymous